Thursday, June 24, 2010

I remember first coming to New Zealand from Malaysia and wondering why a friend said “Choice” when I lent her my pen, also after I worked out that it wasn’t a pin she wanted. It dawned on me, of course, that Kiwis are fond of abbreviated phrases, so “Choice” is an adjective and not a noun, as in “the choicest of vegetables”. The whale is simply “beached as”. Doubt is expressed with a “Not even!”

In this new exhibition at Gallery 2, Pippa Makgill, an expat New Zealander currently based in Melbourne, has invited twenty artists from New Zealand, some who now live in Melbourne, to exhibit with her in Choice!. The exhibition's title is synonymous with "Awesome!", its tone celebratory and affirmative. Art of varying shapes and sizes was mailed to Pippa over a two-week period, resembling bulky postcards from home.

Pippa does not identify herself as a curator in this exhibition, since she has given the artists free reign to send her art that they feel comfortable entrusting into her hands, so this selection of art is limited to who she invited and what they were willing to send in the mail. She is more of a facilitator, creating a cross-tasman art channel. Her approach is that of inviting different friends to a dinner party and seeing who hits it off.

When I moved to New Zealand, my strategy for feeling less homesick for Malaysia was to learn more about the culture of my adopted country. I tried learning Maori because that was the language spoken here for hundreds of years. I put down roots – literally – and began a vegetable garden to feel as if I were being nourished by the land. I also turned to its literature because that taught me more about the nation’s psyche better than any history book could.

I learned, for instance, about the pakeha literary nationalists in the 1950s who struggled to find a uniquely New Zealand voice in their writing instead of looking back to England for an identity. This act of looking back interests me greatly, for I often 'look back' to whence I came - the distance provides a tension that is useful in my creative life. Hence I completely identify with CK Stead's sentiment that "remoteness is not something our writers should deny or regret, but something to be acknowledged, and exploited as an analogue for the immovable tensions which are universal in human experience" (from his essay For the Hulk of the World's Between, 1961).

These writers wearied of apologizing for New Zealand’s remoteness from the rest of the world. It seemed as though New Zealand were a question mark interrupting the ocean; a thin strip at the mercy of maritime weather, its face continually sculpted by the sea. Oh, to break free from its precarious identity!

Now isn’t that the same cry of the immigrant? I often wonder about things like whether my spiritual connection to my Malaysian ancestors goes from broadband to dial-up whenever I’m in New Zealand. Is my Malaysianness eroding the more time I spend away from home? It’s no wonder then that I identified strongly with the nationalist poets like Allen Curnow and Charles Brasch. They wanted to store up their own literary reserves to draw from, to be independent of geography in a way.

Since Brasch wrote the lines, “divided and perplexed the sea is waiting” (The Islands) in 1948, New Zealand has matured into a country comfortable in its own skin. As the contemporary New Zealand poet Bill Manhire puts it, “I live at the edge of the universe,/ like everybody else” (Milky Way Bar, 1991). With these lines, Manhire confidently (or indignantly) proclaims that he has learnt the trick of standing upright here, asserting his identity and ties with the land.

As a new migrant, however, it was my turn to form a question mark against the sea as I began to navigate this socio-political landscape that was foreign to me. I am still learning how to belong, as perhaps expat New Zealanders sometimes feel. This exhibition then is as much about the creative tension created by distance as it is about the choices we make in our creative practices.

Monday, June 14, 2010

This is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Boy (James Rolleston) is a kid growing up in a rural town. When his grandmother sets off to attend a tangi for a few days, Boy is entrusted with the task of looking after his siblings (and cousins, I think). Quite unexpectedly, his father Alamein (played very effectively by Waititi himself), who has just spent some time in jail for robbery, shows up at their house with the rest of his goofy three-man gang, the Crazy Horses. Boy is elated at having a parent again, since his mother died years ago, but we already know by now that Alamein can’t be up to much good. Boy spends much of the movie trying to act like the sort of man he thinks Alamein would approve of, basically apeing his wayward father… and it all comes to a head one night...

Boy has very funny moments from beginning to end but what lingers is sadness. Having said that, it’s not a downer of a movie at all – in fact, it ends on a very joyous note with the much-talked-about Poi E/Thriller mashup that is reminiscent of the dance numbers at the end of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi.

The director as actor

Waititi is a fine director and he’s equally competent as an actor. Playing a role in his own film must not only be cost effective, but according to Waititi, it gave him more control over the project:

Waititi ended up casting himself as Boy’s wayward father Alamein, a flighty yet charming parental figure with more than a few schemes up his sleeve. “I auditioned lots and lots of people for the role, and it wasn’t quite what I wanted,” Waititi remembers. “The character’s based on a couple of relations of mine, and there were specific things that I really wanted, little character things. I wasn’t getting it, so I thought it just made sense for me to do it.”

And ultimately, that helped Waititi to better direct Rolleston and his fellow young thespians. “It helped to be acting opposite them and engaging with them while we were doing stuff,” says Waititi. “We’d just change lines or change the meanings of lines, which would change the performance. I could sort of micromanage that way.”

-In With The NEW by Sarah Kuhn, Backstage, Feb 4-10 2010

Besides the logistical convenience of it, I think that a director who assumes key roles in his own films is bound to encourage more conceptual readings of his work, too. What follows then is my take on the significance of Waititi’s dual role as director-actor.

Absence and presence in Taika Waititi’s films

Interestingly, Waititi plays absent characters in both his feature films. For a director to do this creates a couple of paradoxes. In Eagle Vs Shark, he plays the more successful older brother Gordon who inexplicably commits suicide (no, that was not a spoiler). In Boy, he plays the prodigal father Alamein who returns to his family after a stint in jail. Although Alamein comes back into the family fold, he had missed his sons’ formative years and remains emotionally incompetent and distant, and therefore still absent in a way.

First of all, absence only creates another kind of presence, if not a more pronounced one. Gordon and Alamein, by detaching themselves from their families in their respective ways, become emblems of loss; they are the void that the other characters circle around. Similarly, a director is somebody around whom everyone on set revolves. He is not an emblem of loss but an object of desire in that everybody working on the film, presumably, strives to serve his vision. Even without acting in his own film, the director is the very definition of presence because his unique sensibility is stamped all over the product.

Secondly, for the director to be playing a largely absent character is hugely ironic because we can’t help but recognize him as director of the film; it interrupts the viewer’s suspension of disbelief that the character truly is ‘lost’ to us. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I just think it’s interesting that this director places himself smack in the middle of that void.

Loss upon loss

In both of Waititi’s feature films, there is also –dare I call it a theme? – a narrative about loss upon loss. The loser younger brother in Eagle Vs Shark had already lost his parents’ favour even before his elder brother killed himself. Boy had already lost his mother when she died giving birth to his brother Rocky (again, not a spoiler) only to endure the loss of a father to prison life.

Enough with the Wes Anderson comparisons, already!

Waititi has more emotional depth. And he’s funnier. A common Anderson theme is the selfish parent who wreaks emotional havoc on their offspring. By contrast, how does Waititi handle this material? Where Anderson uses deadpan ‘humour’ to mask deep-seated emotional pain, Waititi has Boy displaying real disillusionment and loss. Anderson’s characters are stuck in a juvenile state of mind. Waititi’s characters experience true catharsis. It’s true, I dislike Wes Anderson films.

I didn’t want to mention the obvious, but

I think much has been said about New Zealand films moving away from its ‘cinema of unease’ aka ‘antipodean gothic’. At the recent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, publisher Fergus Barrowman (who is married to writer Elizabeth Knox) picked out a scene from Boy to illustrate this point. SPOILER (roll over white text to read): When Alamein angrily grabs his jacket off Boy in public, notice how Boy’s friends crowd around him to comfort him. If this film had been given a darker treatment, the camera would have zoomed away from the boy standing alone on the road, betrayed by his father. Instead, Waititi has his Boy supported by his community, and then marching forward determinedly. This might be indicative of a sense that New Zealanders are shifting away from a ‘man alone’ mindset and into a more social mindset.

With young exciting filmmakers like Florian Habicht and Taika Waititi, we’re seeing some really joyous stuff on our big screens.